SHEFALI writes:

I am a long time lurker, first time commentor. Let me first tell you how much I appreciate your site and how helpful it has been to me. Thank you very much for the wisdom you share and your wonderful observations on life.

I am an Indian woman, living in Mumbai. I would like to add to the comments on the Yoga Mail thread. It is appalling how some opportunistic hippies have picked some Eastern practices randomly, twisted them for their own agendas and pushed the packaged product on an unsuspecting public in the guise of the New Age. I have practiced Yoga, learnt it from a teacher here in India and know what is what. I have also read the atrocious, Do It books that are peddled across bookstores by self-styled American gurus on the subject that proliferate book stores across the world.

Yoga for one, means Unity, a coming together of two aspects in harmony. No, that practice of physical twists and jerks is NOT the Yoga . Yoga, in the Vedic tradition implies a unity of the Self with God through all our actions, thoughts and speech. The central theme of the Vedic belief is Karma Yoga: Unity with God through actions that are a service to him.

You wont find THAT in any of the books now will you. It eerily echoes the Christian belief that our lives are not our own but a service to God. And the hippies can’t have you know THAT! What they selectively moan about and propagate is Hatha Yoga, a physical set of exercises, in no way connected to Eastern Spirituality, created by a different set of seers.

Now moving on to the Physical Yoga, for one, genuine gurus discourage excessive practice of traditional yoga postures and breathing practices. They date back to a time when we ate differently and exercise was not something we did, it was something that happened to our bodies in the pre-Industrial Era. The breathing exercises especially can cause great harm, they were designed for a time when the air was not laced with pollutants and particles of man-made origin.

Also they were designed for a different race and genetic profile, even among Indians. We have numerous races in India and not all of them are suited to Hatha Yoga. If practiced in excess, it can burn the body tissues, that is why so many yoga teachers look reedy. The best way to stay healthy is eat and exercise like your gene pool has been doing for millenia. If they were doing it wrong we wouldn’t be here now would we ? Besides, that is what our body will respond the best to, simple logic.

Cindy said, ” He considers the attitude produced by serious, dedicated, continuing yoga practice to be a rejection of “the creative act.” He says you become more relative-minded. “Too blissy? Too accepting of everything?”

And he is right, if God has placed you on a path that requires any kind of action or creation, that is the BEST Yoga for you. Only when you perform all your actions and surrender them and their fruits to God will you ever true Yoga.

She also wrote: ” I recall so clearly how he slagged the much vaunted disappearance of “desire” that’s the goal of some Eastern “

The above only applies to those who chose the path of renunciation as monks. For the rest of us, we are to treat our desires as those of God and their fulfillment as a service to God too. At best, the hippie version of Yoga that has been mass-marketed is a dangerous sham, a type of psychological poisoning that even the best liberal shrink can’t cure. It is clinical Narcissism, evident even to densest, illiterate Indian who toils in a farm all day long and has not heard of ” Fulfillment.”

” He pointed to India as an example of the culture that produced yoga and said, “Need I say more?” ” Correction: the India today is not the one that produced Yoga. That India, was one of the richest countries in the world, bled dry by centuries of petty squabbling among its own kingdoms and colonialism. The India today – is the result of 5 decades of Socialism so strong it puts Cuba to shame.

Laura writes:

Thank you very much for writing. I was hoping someone from India would explain the wild distortions of contemporary yoga in the West and put them in their proper perspective. 

“Power yoga” and the materialistic side of contemporary American yoga, as exemplified by the catalogues I described and popular spas where people go for intensive yoga retreats which seem to be more a form of pampering and spiritual oblivion than anything else, are religious practices that have been cheapened, almost a form of cultural theft.

 What is most interesting to me about Shefali’s comments is that they illustrate how religion is deeply rooted, even genetically rooted, in a people. Ritual cannot simply be ripped from its context by an entirely different people without doing serious damage to that particular form of communion with God.

Shefali responds:

It is really sad and angers me when I see how Eastern practices are selectively stolen and commercialized, and not to the customer’s benefit at all.

I don’t know what you think of Carl Jung, but you may find it interesting to read his observations on exactly this kind of dabbling into Eastern spirituality by Westerners. Psychological poisoning is his term – the borrowing of a ritual or a spiritual practice in the absence of the archetypes that are needed to digest the same result to it. Incurably at that.

There are spiritual traditions that even groups of the same nationality don’t digest well; it’s rooted in the genes.

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Cindy writes:

I was pleased to read Shefali’s views on this topic. Absolutely correct – you can’t go around glomming onto the very old traditional practices and beliefs of a different people. I know loads of people my own age who out of the blue decided to become Buddhists, etc. but they look and act silly. An example: about 15 years ago I attended a talk by a Buddhist from southeast Asia; he was talking about “parenting” and that’s what drew me to attend.

Well, I could not understand a word this Buddhist parenting expert said, his accent was so strong and his English vocabulary so poor. However, most of the audience, which consisted of his local followers, applauded like Buddha himself had appeared in the room. One fellow in the audience was sitting in some kind of lotus-like position in the aisle, rocking back and forth like he needed a dose of thorazine, asking a question of the speaker, “What is love?” Ooooh, great question, right? The Asian speaker replied with not one comprehensible word. But most of the people in the room were nearly transfigured with joy at all this transcendant wisdom.

And don’t think I’m exaggerating one little bit. Only a talent like Truman Capote, Thomas Hardy, Tom Wolfe or Dostoevsky could do justice to what occurred in that room. My family and I lurched out of there, unable to make sense of anything we’d heard & seen. My mind still reels.

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